Diplomats from across Europe gathered in Kaunas, Lithuania, this past weekend to commemorate the victims of “Convoy 73,” a train of 878 French Jewish men that Nazi Germans sent to the Baltics in 1944 to enslave and murder.
Representatives of the Lithuanian, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, French and Israeli governments joined descendants of victims at the ceremony.
Only 22 out of 878 deportees in the convoy survived. Victims included the father of the first female president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, who unveiled a memorial to him and others at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 2006.
Of the 79 trains of Jews deported from Drancy, France, “Convoy 73” was the only one sent to the Baltics, rather than concentration and death camps, for reasons that are still unclear.
Prisoners were forced to work on Organization Todt construction projects as well as dispose of the bodies of fellow Jews. They were confined to barracks and subjected to brutal treatment; anyone leaving to relieve themselves during the night was shot. After the entire group was massacred by the Nazis, the Polish prisoners who interred their bodies in a mass grave were also murdered.
The history of Convoy 73 remains incomplete and is being investigated by the forensic Holocaust research institute Yahad-In Unum. Father Patrick Desbois, its founder, attended the ceremony.
